Not a great deal to say about this one, but I thought it was well worth a mention. In my quest to recreate a factory MGB GT V8 engine bay appearance as closely as possible, one of the trickier parts to achieve has been the unique setup for the washer bottle. Factory V8 cars featured a rigid bottle mounted on the bulkhead in front of the brake servo, instead of the soft bladder type mounted on the nearside inner wing as found on contemporary 4-cylinder cars. I’m not entirely sure of the reason for the difference, even taking into account the larger V8 engine, there would still seem to be enough space on the inner wing for the original setup to co-exist with it. But I like a challenge, so my mission was clear and I had to do it the hard way.
The V8 bottle itself is not a problem at all – it’s a BL parts bin component, readily available from the usual suppliers as part number GWW901, along with its cap, so I quickly acquired one of them. The problem is the bracket which attaches it to the bulkhead – part number BHH1154. To the best of my knowledge this was a bespoke part completely unique to the GT V8, and is no longer available. Most probably it’s never been available since the original production run ended in 1976, given it’s not a wearing part and demand would be low, so I suspect the only place to get one is out of a genuine factory car, and they do not come up for breaking very often!
So naturally, I made one.
Since I don’t have a factory V8 at my disposal to use as a reference, I began by using the bottle as a basic template for scale and dimensions, and then in combination with various close up pictures of the original bracket from books and the internet, I came up with this creation below, all fashioned from a single sheet of mild steel.
It may not be 100% accurate to every dimension of the original bracket, but painted black and mounted on the car I believe it’s a pretty good recreation of a part that genuinely is “unobtanium”, even if I say so myself.
